Cinema: The New Pictures: Dec. 6, 1937

Damsel in Distress (RKO Radio) sends Fred Astaire dancing into a foggy English countryside to rescue fair-haired, big-featured Joan Fontaine from the errant vagaries of a typical P. G. Wodehouse story. Not so lissome a heroine as light-footed Ginger Rogers (temporarily otherwise engaged), inexperienced Actress Fontaine (Olivia de Havilland’s sister) goes gamely but somewhat lumberingly through the curvets and caracoles required of her. Far more facile as an Astaire partner is, of all people, rumpish Radio Dunce Gracie Allen, who with her harassed husband, George Burns, makes up the Astaire party.

Dancer Astaire plays Jerry Halliday, an American musicomedy star involved in a muddled case of mistaken affinity. The service staff at Totieigh Castle are running a sweepstakes on the young mistress’ suitors, and Jerry is not even listed. Alyce (Joan Fontaine) has set her heart on an American ski jumper whom she met in Switzerland. Tyrannical Aunt Caroline (Constance Collier) is insisting on the British pianist (Ray Noble) who accompanies the madrigal singers. Alyce’s final decision, urged on her by benign Lord Marshmorton (Montague Love), that the American occupying the nearby lodge is worth two in the distant Alps and Pianist Noble to boot, wins the sweepstakes for the castle Boots (Moppet Harry Watson), who had been playing the field.

Most elaborate of the dance sequences is hoofed by Astaire, Burns & Allen at a country fair. After trying their fantastic toes on turntables, rolling barrels, slippery slides, the trio trip into the magic mirror room, become stumpy, stilted, wide & narrow by turns. The climax is a mirror that clips them off, leaving only disembodied dancing legs. Reginald Gardiner, whose stage repertory includes imitations of ugly wallpaper, effeminate French railway trains, weltering bell buoys, contributes one soul-bursting scene as an aria-minded butler tossing inhibition to the wood winds and singing a tenor solo from the opera Martha.

Except for the Martha interlude, the music is the last complete score done by the late George Gershwin. (He was working on tunes for the Goldwyn Follies when he died last summer.) Brother Ira Gershwin did the lyrics. Catchiest number: Nice Work If You Can Get It.

Nothing Sacred (David O. Selznick) is a spirited little comedy about a girl who is slowly dying of radium poisoning. It is a comedy because Hazel Flagg (Carole Lombard) and Dr. Downer (Charles Winninger), her Warsaw, Vt. physician, know that she isn’t really dying at all. But by the time Downer finds he has made a mistake in his diagnosis, the story about Hazel has appeared in the New York Morning Star. Reporter Wally Cook (Fredric March) takes her away from Warsaw. He is in trouble with his managing editor (Walter Connolly) and Hazel is his peace offering.

He makes the city’s great stone heart palpitate for her tragedy. Waiters cry into the champagne they pour to lighten her last moments. The mayor honors her, schoolchildren serenade her with a treble dirge, airplanes write a welcome in the sky, the Governor appoints the unknown day of her impending burial as a holiday. What makes it hard for Hazel to tell Wally about Downer’s error is that, with a healthy woman’s facility for ignoring details, she has fallen in love with him. Wally finally gets wise to Hazel’s hoax, but he still has his public to consider. He pulls her out of bed, deals out a regretfully vigorous drubbing to make her angry, give her a fever that may fool the medicos. When Hazel comes to, she smiles sweetly, K.O.’s Wally.

Nothing Sacred is for the most part competently managed entertainment, but its trouble is that its characters have to behave to fit an artificial plot. March and Lombard, however, work hard to conceal this handicap and, good troupers that they are, seldom show the perspiration their effort requires. Ben Hecht’s screen play, which fails to overcome the story’s implausibilities, crackles with thorny lines for unwary Achilles’ heels.

Best shot: front page of the Morning Star revealing Hazel-Flagg’s “Farewell to New York,” the suicide note in which, bound on her honeymoon with Wally, she informs the grieving city she has gone to meet her fate alone, like an elephant.